The ISS has been called an 'orbital turkey,' so why is this so-called fiscal conservative wielding the baster?

That’s the way boosters of the International Space Station (ISS) see reports that the forthcoming Trump administration budget essentially eliminates NASA funding for the orbital ISS after the current authorization ends in 2024. Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz is leading the attack, blaming the “numbskulls” at the Office of Management and Budget. “As a fiscal conservative, you know one of the dumbest things you can do is cancel programs after billions in investment when there is still serious usable life ahead,” he said.

This shows 1) the term “fiscal conservative” has probably lost all real meaning, and 2) Cruz is trying to blame bureaucrats for a decision they’re not empowered to make rather than take on his own party.

Fact is, even before the Russians began construction in 1998 and an American and two Russians first occupied it in 2000, the ISS drew strong criticism from experts in various space-related fields.

“We were supposed to be having space odysseys by 2001,” said director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University Lawrence Krauss. Instead, we got a “boondoggle orbiting in space closer to Earth than Washington D.C. is to New York.”

Steven Weinberg, a particle physicist at the University of Texas at Austin and a co-recipient of the 1979 Nobel Prize in physics, labeled the station “an orbital turkey.”

Initially, the ISS was supposed to shut down in 2020, but four years ago Congress extended its life to 2024. So it’s still getting four more years of funding than was originally intended.

Yet for all of its building and operating costs, the research returns are essentially nil. Sure, NASA has a huge list of experiments performed aboard the ISS with very impressive sounding verbiage. But the fact is, despite the gravity on the space station being slightly less (it’s called “microgravity”: while people seem to think there’s no gravity on the ISS, it’s actually about 0.88 percent that of the earth), you can’t do anything aboard the ISS that can’t also be done far more cheaply on earth.

So when we read that ISS experimentation has produced “novel robotic surgical techniques that may allow the successful removal of tumors previously thought to be inoperable,” we should wonder how a microgravity atmosphere could possibly have played any part in that achievement. Answer: it couldn’t have.

Meanwhile, many microgravity experiments can be done on the reduced gravity aircraft that NASA has been using since 1957 to train astronauts, charmingly dubbed “Vomit Comets.”

When Cruz talks about the station’s “serious usable life,” he seems to be referring to the structure itself, which, admittedly, can stay in orbit a long time before its orbit decays. But so what? The U.S.S. Constitution has been afloat since 1798. The best explanation for Cruz’s actions is that his state is home to the Johnson Space Center—which NASA labels the “heart of” its “human spaceflight program”—and that he’s chairman of the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Science, Space, and Competitiveness, which (surprise!) oversees the NASA budget.

There’s nothing a politician hates more than losing control of a purse string. At least the ranking Democrat on the committee, Bill Nelson of Florida, was more honest in saying he would fight the shutdown simply because “such a move would likely decimate Florida’s blossoming commercial space industry.” Florida über alles!

When will taxpayers stop footing the bill? Leaked NASA documents make reference to a possible privatization of the ISS, which may be a White House ploy to show up anyone who says the space station has any real value. But such a proposal won’t get off the launching pad. Short of making it a “Galaxyland” for the ultra-rich (hosted not by Mickey Mouse, but Pluto, of course), private industry can’t make any more use of the space turkey than governments have.

They just don’t make basters that big.

Michael Fumento is a journalist, author, and attorney who specializes in health and science.

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8 Responses to Ted Cruz’s Flighty Campaign for the International Space Station

Wonderful article. I grew up and still live in East Central Florida. I can watch rocket launches from KSC from my back yard. The space program has been a turkey since 1970. It is a jobs program. That is all it is.

I live and work among some of NASAs best and brightest engineers. They know the unmentionable: mankind will never, ever, leave planet earth and colonize space. The physics and bio-mechanics don’t make it possible with any technology.

NASA is another instance of the Great American Con, in this case the congressional-missile-industrial complex.

The author forgets that the ISS was created for political reasons, international (one place where communications with Russia would persist to the last) but primarily domestic (the aerospace industry needed the shuttle, the shuttle needed a destination once Saturn boosters were scrapped and Skylab had to be deorbited because of shuttle delays). Given the (opportunity) cost and performance of the shuttle program, which should have been terminated after a few years and two orbiters, it is hard to argue that the issue here is the ISS.

The author also misses that the shuttle was ultimately terminated only after Commercial Crew offered a new venue for profit-extraction from the “elected and representative” large-scale spending of public tax revenue through private “partners”. ISS existed as a destination for the shuttle, now it persists as a destination for ULA, the Senate Launch System and, despite best efforts on Congress and political NASA, SpaceX.

There are compelling reasons to have a space program, especially an international one, but profit or cost effectiveness is not among them. A long-term presence in LEO is useful only as part of a larger effort to construct permanent structures in GEO and cis-lunar space, and the only research that requires an ISS or any other long-term presence in space is research into … long-term spaceflight. There might or might not be competitive manufacturing processes that require microgravity, but it is essential for building low gravity and Earth gravity equivalent centrifuge habs, and for final field-testing any life support systems and engineering prototypes for machines meant to operate in microgravity.

Closed loop life support systems, on the other hand, can largely be researched anywhere where we can build an airtight building.

The end result of any serious research requiring the ISS would have been justified only as another step toward even more spending on spaceflight. Hence NASA, for all the blather about a Mars colony, never really tried that hard to find and disclose inconvenient answers on just how incompatible even the robustest, most versatile mammalian – or human – body is with long-term exposure (let alone conception, gestation, birth) in Moon or Mars gravity equivalent, or microgravity.

US spaceflight has become another con. The same might not be said of Russian or Chinese efforts – or even SpaceX.

But then, NASA “waste” pales in comparison to the ongoing efforts of the original congressional-military-industrial complex.

Whatever inconsistencies and failings NASA have delivered along the way, the agency has produced a lot fewer dead bodies, almost no innocent victims, and a heck of a lot more inspiration than the Pentagon and its war-profiteering camp followers.

When it comes to “turkeys”, I’d cut the “national securities” budget in half and then some, and give most the money to cancer research *and* the space program. That is especially true of the nuclear warhead, triad and missile defense “turkeys”.

I do think Fumento demonstrates at best only a tenuous grasp of the concept of “opportunity cost” here.

Well, Panama has no space station, nor does Columbia, that I’m aware of. So why should the U.S.? And we have poor people too. Why spend 3 bil a year on the ISS? That could buy a lot of pampers and hypodermic needles to give away in places like San Francisco. Alright, enough snark. You want to throw away the space station? I’m down with that if you take that 3 bil and put it in the ‘MANNED’ space program, send us back to the moon, to mars. But if you want to just shut it down and leave space exploration to first world countries like China, Russia, Japan, Saudi Arabia, I ain’t down with that.

Actually, “cancel[ing] programs after billions in investment” is exactly what fiscal conservatives should do. It is called the ‘sunk costs fallacy’ by economists (except Keynesians, who probably think it is a fantastic idea to dump money into failed investments). One should not consider previous investment as a justification for future investment.

The opposite, which Cruz apparently thinks is logical, is called the ‘escalation of commitment’.

It is far past time to dump the ISS into the ocean, where it belongs. Spend the money on robotic exploration instead..

From what I can tell, the most significant POSSIBLE breakthrough with stem cells in microgravity is that they MAY differentiate more quickly. Speed of proliferation is NOT among the many difficulties in APPLYING this potential therapy. In the event, unless we want to take stem cells up to the ISS every time we want to grow them a little faster that would not seem a wise use of funds.

Yet this is the typical “breakthrough” stuff you do see as justifying $3-4 BILLION NASA spends on the ISS every year.

There’s lots of waste in the so-called MIC but I don’t get lots of words. I also have a much longer piece coming out on the merits of manned vs. unmanned space flight. But here I clip off and discuss just one aspect as illustrative of the problem.

The problem is that whatever tangible advantages manned space travel once may have had have either completely disappeared or will disappear quite soon as AI and robotics continue to develop at breakneck speed. In almost all areas, the machines are already ahead and that gap widens by the year.

It seems the only real advantage to manned is a sort of sentimentality and bragging rights. But there are lots of bragging rights in space beyond putting human footprints on Mars, the latest being the incredible launch and partial recovery of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy.

The US also has the ONLY Mars rovers, only space telescope, only vehicles like the 2 Voyagers and on and on. If China or Russia want to spend massive amounts of lucre to put THEIR footprints on Mars, knowing those humans can’t begin to do the kinds of experiments the Mars rovers already are, let them go for it! With China especially, we very much need for them to waste their money more rapidly than we waste ours.

I generally agree with the article, and my career was in aerospace. However, it is so tiresome to see authors make apples and oranges comparisons. Here the comparison is the spending over 14 years on the space station to the spending in one year at the National Cancer Institute. This approach is taught in law schools, but banned in engineering schools. Why undercut your arguement this way?